After all the
uncertainty which the first half of yesterday's verse seemed to
stimulate, we return to more familiar territory in today's verse with
what seems to be a straightforward divergence between the ostensible
meaning and the ironic hidden meaning.

Ostensibly today's
verse expresses the ascetic principle of pursuing pain as a means to
spiritual advancement, leading ultimately to heaven itself.

But below the surface
of today's verse, as I read it, the man born again is ironically
expressing the gist of the teaching that the Buddha unfolded for the
benefit of fellow human beings on the earth, beginning with
duḥkha-satya, the truth of suffering, the first of the four noble
truths.

By thus presenting us
in today's verse with words that can be read as expressing the gist
of asceticism as well as the gist of the Buddha's teachings,
Aśvaghoṣa encourages us to be clear about the similarities and
differences between the two approaches.

In that sense today's
verse, in which the man born again concludes his five-verse
monologue, can be read as the verse that unlocks the whole of the
present Canto.

The 1st pāda
sums up what the two different approaches have in common – the aim of benefitting from painful experiences accumulated over years of practice.

The 2nd pāda
ironically highlights the major difference, in terms of where passing
through painful experiences is expected to lead the practitioner.
Ascetic self-denial is undertaken with the idea that endurance of pain in itself is a means of climbing up the
spiritual food chain until one sits with the gods – or maybe if one is
lucky sleeps for a time with the celestial nymphs – in heaven. In
the Buddha's teaching lofty aspiring for heaven is eschewed in favour
of earthbound activities like counteracting 1g with one's total self,
and like counteracting 1g as the total forgetting of one's self. Sitting like this, moreover, is not a means for gaining spiritual ends. It might rather be a means for dropping off spiritual end-gaining ideas and finding oneself instead springing up from the earth.

The 3rd pāda
states a truth – that we come to sukha via a path full of duḥkha – which is common to both the Buddha's teaching and
asceticism, but for different reasons.

The sukha of ascetic
self-denial is the happiness or pleasure associated with that whizzing
around of endorphins which is set in motion by pain itself. We feel
this burst of happiness or pleasure after we have sat for a long time
with painful legs, for example, or after enduring a cold shower on a
cold day. But this is not always the sukha associated with freedom
from the enslaving chains of habit – though it might be associated
with a certain freedom from habitual worrying about being comfortable.

In the Buddha's teaching sukha is ease to be experienced within the act of sitting itself, not only after
painful sitting practice has been endured. So the ease is different,
and at the same time the arduousness or difficulty or painfulness of
the path is different. The arduousness of the ascetic path is rooted
in the difficulty of enduring pain, pure and simple. The arduousness
of the Buddha's path is rooted in the difficulty of enduring not only physical and mental pain, like pain in the legs or pain of separation, but also in the sheer frustration, not to say despair, the practitioner is liable to
experience when confronted with the difficulty of cutting out faults
which are so deeply-ingrained. This difficulty of the Buddha's path, in other words, is the difficulty of really scratching the surface of the tortoise. Hence the Buddha tells
Nanda:

Because
of the instinct-led accumulation, from time without beginning, of the
powerful mass of afflictions, / And because true practice is so
difficult to do, the faults cannot be cut off all at once. // SN16.71
//

For the last three
syllables of the 3rd pāda I have followed EBC's reading
of kṣiyanti (EBC: they eventually dwell in
happiness). EHJ amended to hy upaiti (“For
bliss is obtained by the path of suffering”).
This amendment does not change the meaning much, though it makes the
repetion of hi in the 4th pāda look out of place.

More problematic,
however, is EHJ's amendment in the 4th pāda of duḥkhaṁ
to sukhaṁ – hence EHJ: for bliss they say
is the ultimate end of dharma; PO: for the root of dharma,
they say, is bliss.

EHJ adds a footnote
that whether one should read duḥkham, as indicated by the old
Nepalese manuscript, or sukham as indicated by the Tibetan
translation, depends on the meaning given to mūlam. EHJ then
proceeds to answer his own question with reference to the ancient
Indian text known as the Laws of Manu. EHJ writes: The point is settled by
Manu, xi, 235, tapo-mūlam idaṁ sarvaṁ daiva-mānuṣakaṁ
sukham. [This basis of asceticism, for all gods and men alike, is
pleasure.]

In my book the point is
settled by the fact that the original Sanskrit manuscripts have
duḥkham not sukham, and neither the Tibetan translation nor an
extraneous Hindu text provide a reliable basis for overruling the
original manuscript. On top of that, the point of the 4th
pāda as I read it is that duḥkham, pain and suffering, is both the
foundation of asceticism and the place where the Buddha started his
teaching of the four noble truths.

So EHJ changed duḥkham to sukham, and somehow took mūlam to mean "the ultimate end," and on that basis translated the 4th pāda: for bliss, they say, is the ultimate end of dharma.

This might be one of the more outstanding examples of “Send
reinforcements, we are going to advance!” having turned into “Send three
and fourpence, we are going to a dance!”

VOCABULARY

evaṁ-vidhaiḥ
(inst. pl. n.) mfn. of such a kind , in such a form or manner , such